Today, the use of imaging devices such as digital cameras for conducting surveillance or monitoring operations is widespread. For example, digital cameras are often used to monitor the arrivals or departures of goods or the performance of services in materials handling facilities such as warehouses, fulfillment centers, retail establishments or other like facilities, as well as the travels of persons or objects in locations such as airports, stadiums or other dense environments, or the flow of traffic on one or more sidewalks, roadways or highways. Digital cameras are also frequently installed in financial settings such as banks or casinos, where money changes hands in large amounts, at high rates of speed, or between large numbers of people.
In dynamic environments such as materials handling facilities, transportation centers, financial institutions or like structures in which diverse collections of people, objects or machines enter and exit from such environments at regular or irregular times or on predictable or unpredictable schedules, it is frequently difficult to detect and track small and/or fast-moving objects using digital cameras. Most systems for detecting and tracking objects in three-dimensional (or “3D”) space are limited to the use of a single digital camera and involve both the generation of a 3D mesh (e.g., a polygonal mesh) from depth imaging data captured from such objects and the patching of portions of visual imaging data onto faces of the 3D mesh.
Generating and tracking a 3D model of an object from imaging data captured from the object (e.g., visual images of an object, or depth images or other samples of depths or ranges to the object) is a computationally expensive process that tends to consume or occupy substantial amounts of available data storage, processing and transmission capacities, and may require comparatively lengthy processing times. Therefore, in environments where objects that are to be tracked are large in number or small in size, or are located in tight or crowded quarters or moving at high speeds, the generation and tracking of 3D models of such objects is currently infeasible.